In any event, the elaborate arm mechanism, dome plastics we would not know until the model was unveiled to the world at whatever the event was.

Before that though, the steel box didn't stop us from opening it up to look inside. Though our steel enclosures had something closer to a baseball "home plate" footprint, when we peeked inside we saw the circular PCB and knew we were being duped.

With the dangly display they seemed to go quicker than other prototypes to the dumpsters left in Apple's hallways when the actual product was released. I am aware of three MAME machines I built around discarded prototypes. (Shhh!!!!)

I think two of the three prototypes running MAME died eventually — the third I left behind at Apple when I retired. So, fate unknown.

Shortly after though is probably when Apple started locking the dumpsters to keep out the divers like me. (Well, probably more to keep them from ending up on eBay I suspect.)

They’d probably lose all federal contracts for four years, but they’d gain some even more dedicated following.

Sadly, the iPad and its walled garden don't appeal to me --- the "click" of the Apple Pencil when it is touched to the screen drives me nuts --- really sad that there isn't a real successor to the Axiotron Modbook. I'm tempted by a Mac Mini w/ a Wacom Movink 13 screen, but it's quite low resolution compared to the Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 I'm writing this out on.

Edit: oops needed to read further on. You're right.

Ps:

> I'm not sure whether the DockLite or the 20-year old LCD screen is to blame for this, but there is noticeable color banding on the screen, especially with macOS window shadows.

Yeah that would be the LCD. In those days most LCDs were pretty crappy 6-bit TN panels.

You can look at the iMac line and see that they moved to a more laptopy everything-in-the-screen design, which got rid of the base altogether. But it's weird and sad that there was a "best" and then things that came after the best that were less fun, and two decades later we all still seem to feel that way.

I suppose part of that was all the attention that shifted to touchscreen phones, and computers becoming thought of as practical work tools.

The reason old computers were fun is because all the hip young millennials loved them for everything. That has become much less the case as the younger generations do everything with a phone/tablet/or console. Just surfing the internet for my generation was a chore that is hard for the younger generations to understand.

That really depends on how you define computer literate, because I'm seeing some incredible work being done by the younger generations, both for modern computers, but also for the machines of my youth in the 80s and 90s. Most of the Gen Z I previously taught might not know Excel, Word or even Windows, but they certainly knows how to use and abuse Google Docs and Sheets.

As for deep knowledge on the inner workings of a PC, I don't think they are worse of then previous generations. You have a tiny group of absolute geniuses, a small, but larger group of above average who will become future engineers and developers, then an tiny group of people who can operate modern Windows applications will insane skill levels, and finally the reset, who can sort of get by.

I don't dispute that. The younger generations have a huge leg up in terms of available educational resources.

My point is more that the average millennial will be computer literate while the average genz or alpha will not. By literate I mean having a basic understanding of how computers work. Like what a file is, how to find them, what a hard drive or mouse is and does. How to type.

I didn't doubt that the younger Gens will likely run circles around me in terms of programming. Similar to how there were really smart computer literate gen x and boomers.

I was born in 86. My dad got the first Mac as he was graduating from college. I think I was 13 when the iMac G3 and the X Public Beta came out.

Computers were well entrenched in my childhood, but it was the people who were adults when we were children that designed the fun ones.

I agree that adults designed our fun computers but those were adults that specialized in making those devices. If you looked at the average Gen Xer of the era you'd find they have very little interaction with computers.

It was our generation who had computers in the home as children. Very few of prior generations had that privilege.

Gen Z starts around 95. The ipod touch came out in 07. That means that the hot device to get came out when the oldest Gen Z turned 12.

I'd grant that older genz were probably more exposed, but that exposure and familiarity pretty rapidly decreases as they age.

PC games were mainstream too, so it wasn't just work. Really hit me when the school jocks started joining my Minecraft server. Again I think consoles were actually more popular in earlier times, cause PCs couldn't run as many good games until the 2010s.

I can't speak as much for the younger side of gen Z. I assume CS is still more popular among them, there are more PC video gamers than before, and there are Chromebooks if you count that. Not sure if iPads ever actually replaced PCs, besides it was always in Apple's interest not to cannibalize the Mac line.

Even the rise of needing computers/internet access to do homework has sort of worked against learning how computers work. It's all bubble wrapped to hide away the nitty gritty details.

And I'm not actually even saying this is a bad thing. It's just that the way you work with a computer is very different than it was for me. By the time you were exposed a lot of things had already been very simplified.

Just to give you an idea of what I mean by that.

For me to install a game on my old DOS computer, I had to work with potentially multiple 3.5 floppy disks. I'd run `cd A:\` to get to the A drive where the floppy resided. From there I'd run `dir \w` to get a list of the files on the floppy disk. I'd be on the lookout for a `SETUP.EXE` or `INSTALL.EXE` file to start the install process. From there, the installation prompt would ask me a bunch of questions about my computer things like "What sort of sound card do you have"? "What is the IRQ port for your card"? "Do you have a VooDoo Graphics card"? "Where do you want to install this game (We recommend C:\DOOM)"?

After some whirring and clicking the install would be complete and we'd have to `cd C:\DOOM` and run `DOOM.EXE`. There we'd run the executable and... shoot, I put in the wrong sound sound card, the wrong port, etc. It's at that point we'd have to diagnose the problem, maybe modify an .ini file. All from reading the manuals and past experience.

It's that sort of experience that I have which made me intimately familiar with concepts like file systems and disk partitions. Familiar with random parts of a computer in ways that were vastly simplified. I mean, for example, I had to do things like installing new GPU drivers to make some games work properly. I couldn't just trust windows update to grab a relatively up to date (or even the correct) driver.

That said, I'm 1000% sure your CS class was WAY better than my intro to programming. The resources I had for programming were really bad. It was a lot of self taught effort.

Crostini allows for full-blown Linux VMs on ChromeOS. I would have killed for a click-to-reinstall Linux sandbox in my childhood.

Old stuff that required command lines was harder, but I think that was niche and very few people understood it.

And this is why I'm telling you that millennials were more computer literate :D.

We grew up when this old stuff that required command lines was the norm. Maybe you had to be there.

The user experience drastically improved in pretty much every way as I got older. My first computer was DOS which is just a command line. Imagine doing everything through iTerm2 and that's how I and a fair number of millennials (particularly older millennials) interacted with computers.

Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 weren't much more than wrappers over dos. For a lot of programs you'd install (Doom for example, but also games like Warcraft and Warcraft II) you still had to do a lot of the work I described above to get them functional.

From a windows perspective it really wasn't until windows XP or so that things became as smooth as you experienced. Everything before that was DEEPLY exposing nearly every aspect of how a computer worked to the end user.

Mac was a bit different, it was always somewhat easier to use than Windows was. However, I and most of my friends dealt primarily with windows machines because that's where the games were all at (and they were cheaper for the hardware you got).

My generation was the one where computers became cheap enough that everyone had one, yet still ran software written primarily for more technical computer people. OS and software devs spent literally decades polishing the UX by the time the first Gen Zers rolled around.

> When I look online, I see something like only 15% of households had a PC in 1990

Millennials go from 80 to 95. The oldest millennials were 9 at 1990. Just 5 years later, 1995, household computers rose to 39% in the US.

For most millennials that boom in computers happened right at their formative years. The millennials were also driving a lot of it. Parents got computers for their kids.

Crostini allows for full-blown Linux VMs. I would have killed for a click-to-reinstall Linux sandbox in my childhood.

My anecdotal experience is that while Gen X were the first generation who could have grown up with a home computer, it still wasn't that common until a fair bit later.

I'm smack bang in the middle of the Millennial generation, and we first got a home computer when I was 11, and at that time I'd say it was 50/50 whether someone's family had a home computer.

And the TI I had was of limited use when I had to use it on the family TV and any basic I typed couldn't be saved because we didn't have the floppy drive.

The ZX Spectrum went for about £99, that was pretty cheap even back then. The less capable ZX81 was only £49 in kit form.

Games consoles were not common here until the 90s because of the wide take up of home computers.

However, having a home computer was still somewhat of a luxury, and definitely not a necessity until at least high school for me. It wasn't until college that I could ask someone what their email address was without first asking whether they had email at all.

They existed surely, with SEGA on the forefront, but not something most households cared about.

Home computers gaming was what the majority of us had.

My view is certainly skewed since we had a 386SX, but there were tens of thousands of BBS's running back then. Online services exploded in the early 90's, shareware games like Doom and Wolfenstein sold hundreds of thousands of copies. In 1992, Gateway 2000 surpassed Dell by selling over a billion dollars in PC's.

My kindergarten classroom had an Apple II in 1989. Our first grade classroom had old IBM PCs.

My parents bought our first computer in '94 and we were one of the later families to have one (these were actual middle class families).

Spectrums, Commodore, Atari, Amiga, PC, Acorn, as home computers ecosystem surely.

At least in Europe we weren't that much into consoles, having a home system was one from the list above.

I too am quite fearful of the fact that I know zero kids under the age of 15 who have any interest in learning how computers work, despite being completely surrounded by them since age 8 or 9 (via school-issued Chromebooks).

Now I do know a lot of kids under 15 doing computer tinkering, usually gaming PCs. If anything, I'm worried that they do it too much.

That's something I've realized as well. There was a time where typing was something more and more people could do, but now nobody cares/needs to learn how. The number of households that had at least one computer was something I thought would get to pretty much everyone, but now there are more and more people with the only compute device being their phone. Owning a computer seems to be an age indicator like wearing tube socks.

The elder is interested in game development through his love of Roblox. I hope to help him get started with an IDE for lua, git, and a LLM and turn him loose on it.

this makes me nervous for proper learning of anything in the future. when the first step to learning is an LLM vs learning the basics with a good understanding and then moving to the "advanced" tools, I don't think this is really learning

I don't really understand this fear, particularly now with the reasoning models that explain why they did something.

Even if the steps/explanations were actually useful and insightful, though IMHO that's not remotely the same thing as figuring out the steps on your own.

> IMHO that's not remotely the same thing as figuring out the steps on your own.

This is true with pretty much anything, but it doesn't mean we should ignore tools that can do those steps for you.

I'm saying you can't judge some learning process that you're not even witnessing.

Maybe you haven't used an LLM to learn something; maybe you just let it write your code. Not everyone does that.

When folks like you narrow arguments "everyone can only use the LLM exactly like I have, and if you do that, it really hinders your learning"---who sounds irrational?

so who's irrational now by assuming something completely off base?

Morphine is awful and should be banned--just look at these behaviors from addicts.

If you talk to me about valid uses like "minimizing suffering for terminal patients," I'm going to put my fingers in my ears, because I've seen the addicts.

If it sparks his interest he has a lot of life ahead of him to go deeper with it.

I bought a B&W machine from the guy for $50 or $60.

Also grabbed a G4 Digital Audio tower. To my surprise, it was a top-end 733 MHz model.

Maybe it just wasn't possible to put a G5 on that small of a logic board, but it's still an absolutely stunning computer. I have one sitting on my kitchen counter right now!

The stand is stationary regardless of the display angle and way more conducive to stable cable management. The last few generations of iMac made removing the stand technically not a user-serviceable action, so manufacturing USB-hub stand risers custom-fit to iMacs is practically its own industry.

A device still bound by mandates to be unnecessarily thin and light, and with an arbitrarily non-removable stand, can still make the stand a few centimeters thicker, run a fixed line from the logic board and into the stand, and put some or all of the ports inside it.

Hell, go wild and make the bottom of the stand a full inch thick, and you could put a user-accessible m.2 port in it,[1] but that damages the justification for upcharging $200 to add 256GB of storage.

1: https://www.amazon.com/PULWTOP-Adapter-Accessories-Docking-I...

I’m 100% sure it was just too expensive to keep making.

Jobs probably said “price be damned, I love this thing and the manufacturing cost will go down over time” and it didn’t.

Especially if the screen is showing a recipe, unit conversion, timers, etc.

If it's silent, that seems like it could be really cool.

another use case is for watching something or interacting with it via voice when your hands are tied up doing something else or from a distance. same value as vision pro without the goggles or isolation

The LCD panel in the G4 iMac is only 6 bits per pixel, compared to 10 bits per pixel on a modern Macbook Pro or similar, so the banding is just the dithering required to display the gradient shadow

I know what you're trying to say, but this sounds weird. Dithering is a technique employed to PREVENT banding, it does not cause banding.

Weirdly hard to find out with a web search if his was done on the iMac G4 (your comment is already one of the top results for me on Google and DDG!).

A screen using 18 bits per pixel (6 bits per color) would need the 'millions of colors' mode unless Apple designed some clever hack.

It was a very capable Mac that could even play 3D games smoothly - Wolfenstein and a bundled game for kids about escaped aliens who crash landed out west.

One of the best features was the swivel screen, which you could easily whip around to show something to someone else in the room.

The Blue and White PowerMac G3 is my ultimate best looking Mac, there's something about the giant G3 on the sides, and the bold colours for what is a "professional" system. Sadly it all got toned down for the G4...

Edit: I want a translucent atomic purple phone damnit!

Unfortunately my G4 iMac suffers from the lame arm issue which affects most of them at this age. And it's difficult and kinda dangerous to fix (a huuuge amount of tension on the spring).

I bought one used because it was such a beautiful machine. Most beautiful Mac ever.

If Google decides not to support this for Chrome, I'll firewall it from the internet but still plan to use it as an SSH machine.

HDMI and DP at the time didn't have enough bandwidth to support 5k60.

Would be REALLY cool to see a mod where the shell supported a Mac Mini AND a DVD Drive

Would really love to put a series of Diablo 2 discs into this, or Warcraft 3, and play

Apple did make the trashcan Mac Pro, but of course that ended up having problems and was made at just the wrong time. The newer models harken back to the cheese graters but with fancier holes and a smaller overall size.

A new version of that Mac as an iMac with a bigger screen would be amazing. But given screen sizes maybe it would need a really heavy weighted base to survive well.